IT Security News Blast 5-5-2017

Security firms face numerous challenges and no more so than start-ups trying to disrupt the hottest markets with limited resources. “Good ideas are always copied – it’s the quality of execution that differentiates,” says Whitfield, explaining one of his key challenges.“The key to success for start-ups in cybersecurity is around delivering innovation in one of the critical topic areas, rather than re-treading old problems,” says Van Someren, seemingly agreeing.

Good vendors are transparent with their products. They’re also focused on hiring more security staff, and paying them well, instead of recruiting more marketers. The best ones will also be happy to train customers to run their products. “Great security companies are concentrated not just on selling, but they’re interested in supporting your enterprise, and providing consulting [and] best security practices,” he said.

A recent survey done by Soha Systems notes that 63 percent of all data breaches can be attributed to a third party. “The increased reliance on third-party employees, coupled with the growing sophistication of hackers, has led to the current identity and access management crisis that most businesses are faced with today — whether they realize it or not,” a SecZetta blog post stated.

Cybersecurity task force seeks new security framework, exemption to the Stark law

These include a new cybersecurity framework specific to healthcare and amendments to the Physician Self-Referral Law (Stark Law) and the Anti-Kickback Statute to allow healthcare organizations to assist physicians with cybersecurity. These, along with other imperatives set out in the report, would “help to increase awareness, manage threats, reduce risks and vulnerabilities, and implement protections not currently present across a majority of the health care industry.”

`How many of our people already took the awareness training?’ And the answer will be 80-90%.And then I ask the board members if they took the training. And they say, `Oh no! We haven’t taken it yet.’ But their inbox is the first inbox that is going to be targeted.A company can have 6,000 people but the first in line to be targeted are the people in the boardroom. In most of the hacks, the first step is a phishing email.So board members need to be trained to understand the threat and ask the right questions.

One of the big reasons is that security businesses tend to look for people with traditional technology credentials — college degrees in tech fields, for example. But security is truly everyone’s problem; virtually every aspect of personal and professional data is at risk. So why are we limiting security positions to people with four-year degrees in computer science, when we desperately need varied skills across so many different industries? Businesses should open themselves up to applicants whose nontraditional backgrounds mean they could bring new ideas to the position and the challenge of improving cybersecurity.

Employees putting up job information on social media prone to cyber attacks

Highlighting the fact that excessive use of social media by employees could increase the risk of cyber attacks the report said employees with low awareness of risks from social media could become weak links in the organisation and vulnerable to hacks. “It is common for individuals to have their personal information and job profile available and accessible on social media platforms, making the hacker’s job easier,” the report stated.

The demonstration centers around the security flaws in Internet of Things (IoT) devices and how they require emergency security implementations. The robots in question are manufactured by forums like ABB, Kawasaki, Fanuc and Yaskawa. T. The TrendMicro researchers found out that industrial robots from these firms have a vulnerability which allows hackers to make changes in robots altering they way they operate.

The head of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency accused Russian rivals of gathering large amounts of political data in cyber attacks and said it was up to the Kremlin to decide whether it wanted to put it to use ahead of Germany’s September elections. Moscow denies it has in any way been involved in cyber attacks on the German political establishment.

Both Russia and China doubtless also have talented government and military hackers. But Moscow in particular is seen as going much further, sometimes delegating attacks to criminals and others outside government. That strategy, Western experts say, allows such individuals and groups to operate with immunity providing they do not attack targets within their own nations – for example, through credit card theft – and are willing to help the state out with deniable attacks on foreign enemies when asked.

The targets are members of embassies linked to North Korea, as well as public organizations such as UNICEF and the United Nations, Cisco said. The attackers used the Konni malware sparingly, and the most recent attacks were carried out a few days ago. The campaign remains active, as is its infrastructure, which is hosted on a legitimate and free webhost called 000webhost.

U.S. Minutemen gather to sharpen cyber skills needed to face 21st Century threats

“We know how to take a hill and control the sea and the air,” Medlock said. “Industrial control systems is an area of our critical national infrastructure we must defend,” Sgt. 1st Class James Medlock, a National Guard member with the Texas Cyber Protection Team, according to a U.S. Army report. Altering the militaries focus from dealing with physical to cyber threats was a key part of the exercise and the new reality for our nation’s defenders and one that is perfectly suited for the military’s reserve components.

The agency has funded a handful of startups to develop blockchain uses for secure communications, and perhaps more, from weapons systems to file storage. While many have seen the banking industry as an early adopter of this technology and the heftiest of spenders, there is an expectation that billions of dollars will flow into the blockchain market over the next five years from other sources as well, with banks acting as the entry point in creating a degree of legitimacy.

The evidence of the contraband was allegedly found during a search of Cajar’s vehicle, which was towed after he couldn’t provide an officer registration or insurance during a traffic stop. Officer Seth Jensen said he found about seven grams of heroin and a .357 Magnum in the vehicle at the tow yard. But the actual footage of the search that he produced in court was a reenactment of the search, the officer told prosecutors.

In a statement, Google said that fewer than 0.1 percent of Gmail users were affected; as of last February, Google said it had one billion active Gmail users. Google took measures to protect its users by disabling offending accounts, and removing phony pages and malicious applications involved in the attacks. Other security measures were pushed out in updates to Gmail, Safe Browsing and other in-house systems.

The vulnerability, discovered by researchers from GeekPwn, a China-based IoT-focused hacking competition, affects CVR100W Wireless-N VPN routers. The company said there was no evidence of malicious exploitation. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2017-3882 and described as a buffer overflow, affects the device’s Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) implementation and it can allow an unauthenticated, layer 2-adjacent attacker to execute arbitrary code with root privileges or cause vulnerable routers to reload.

A new botnet consisting of more than 15,000 compromised servers has been used to mine various cryptocurrencies, earning its master around $25,000 per month. Mining cryptocurrencies can be a costly investment, as it requires an enormous amount of computing power, but cybercriminals have found an easy money-making solution.

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